So on MS CRM Audit Log screen we could not see any partition details available even though (as shown in screen print below) even though we are using enterprise version of SQL.

We also realized that our audit table grown very large and was started impacting performance as well, during investigation it is revealed that MS CRM organization was created from back up which was taken from standard SQL version.

So when new organization import process run then CRM system did not created these partition so we contacted Microsoft support and they provided following SQL script for this.

After running script we started seeing CRM Audit partition in the system now.

CRM AUDIT: SQL enterprise to standard version

if your requirement is other way around so your current CRM SQL DB is enterprise version and if you want to migrate to standard SQL version then follow the steps provided in this KB article to restore DB and then after this perform normal import organization operation in CRM for this.

I just recently come across customer reported CRM issue related workflow view displaying on demand workflow list random manner and not displaying them in alphabetically manner.

This issue mainly hits you if you got lots of workflow related to particular entity and while trying to run specific on demand workflow you will see lots of workflow in view and needs to manually sort the list to find your workflow.

Well looking at issue it seemed really easy issue to fix, so just open relevant view and apply sort on name column and publish the changes BUT this view is called “On Demand Workflows” is not customizable and hence we have to do unsupported change to fix this issue. Following steps done to fix this issue using unsupported manner.

Step 1: first find existing view and view definition from the data base. So run following query for this.

select savedqueryid,name,fetchxml from savedquerybase where name like '%On Demand Workflows%' order by name

Please note down savedqueryid as we will be using this in next steps.

Step 2: So following is the Original FetchXML definition for this view. As can be seen there is default sort order is not defined in this definition.

After applying above changes log in to CRM and verify this view is displayed record correctly now.

****Important Notes regarding above change****
above change is unsupported so make sure you apply this change to Dev, Test environment before applying this to Live environment. Also make sure you take back up of database before doing this
change.

This book covers all different options available for CRM reporting and provides good grounding in CRM reporting aspects so any users/developers want to learn/understand CRM reporting better this is book for them.

Chapter 1: Introduction to Reporting in Microsoft Dynamics CRM

The first chapter explain different types of reports available in CRM and also explains installation procedure for CRM 2011 connects and Reporting authoring extension.

SQL reporting service version sections (page 15) explains different SQL server version compatibility with SQL Server and CRM server and states that SQL Server 2012 is not compatible with Visual studio 2012 for CRM 2011 Reports. I guess this was correct at time of book writing but since then Microsoft released update of SQL Server Data tools and after this update Visual studio 2012 can also be used to develop CRM reports for SQL Server 2012.

Chapter 2: Database Basics

This chapter explain basic and advanced commands of SQL Language and also FetchXML Language. All the dynamics CRM views are created with this FetchXML language and users can now write reports in CRM 2011 using this language as well.

Chapter 3: Creating Your First Report in CRM

This chapter takes you through step by step guide on how to create report in CRM using CRM reporting wizard and then how to modify that report in SQL Reporting Service Project.

Chapter 4: SQL Server Report Builder

This chapter explains step by step guide to create report using SQL Report Builder which comes with SQL Reporting services. SQL Report Builder can be used by intermediate user to develop CRM reports.

Chapter 5: Creating Contextual Reports

This chapter looks at advanced tools (visual studio) to create CRM report and this chapter also reviews CRM report parameters and chart controls.

Chapter 6: Creating Inline Reports

This chapter looks ate crating embed report on CRM entity form. It creates HTML web resource to achieve this functionally and chapter also explains how to create/update this HTML web resource.

Chapter 7: Using Reports and Charts in Dashboard

This chapter explains process of integrating report in CRM dashboard and CRM charts (i.e. new feature in CRM 2011) basics.

Chapter 8: Advance Custom Reporting and Automation

This chapter explains how one can integrate a custom ASP.NET or Silverlight application to show a dynamic or more sophisticated report inside Dynamics CRM 2011

Chapter 9: Failure Recovery and Best Practices

This chapter looks at how one can troubleshoot different issue arising while working with reports in CRM 2011. Quick rightly these details were need as user will tend to hit these issues while developing CRM 2011 report. This chapter also focuses on performance enhancement and SQL Reporting Service Best practices.

Chapter 10: Mobile Client

This chapter explores CRM reports on different mobile devise like iPhone, iPod and Microsoft Surface and also explains process of configuring IFD authentication with CRM.

Appendix: Expression Snippets

This section explores basic expression and their usage in reports and how can you add external code, variable and assemblies in report.

Final Verdict

Provided that we already have Dynamics CRM books but I guess each book generally dedicates chapter or two for CRM reporting only while this book is specifically for CRM reporting which is really good.

And although this does not cover all types of reports (i.e. matrix reports, SQL advanced chart type reports) related to CRM it does cover lots of details related to CRM report So if you are just started work in CRM reports or working in CRM reports but want to know more about it this is definitely book for this.

Share this:

Like this:

Update Contract States job is CRM 2011 (also for CRM 4.0) system job which runs daily and change the contract status based on contract start date and end date (i.e. change contract from Invoiced to active and from Active to expired).

One of customer’s CRM organization has this job running 10 PM at night and wanted to change this job on particular time (very early in the morning) to make sure contract status are up to date when users starts using CRM system.

There is job editor provided by MS to reschedule CRM system jobs but this does not include this specific job.

so following are steps we undertook with the help of CRM parter/MS support to reschedule this particular job in CRM system.

Step 1: run the following query to find the current Jobs in the relevant CRM organization. (note down the AsyncOperationid returned from this query as we will be using this in next step)

select AsyncOperationid,RecurrenceStartTime,postponeuntil,StatusCode, RecurrencePattern from AsyncOperation WHERE
Name = 'Update Contract States job'
and
StatusCode =10
and RecurrencePattern is not null

following quick details regarding important columns in this table.

RecurrencePattern is used to describe frequency and interval of the system jobs and please refer this article for more information on regarding this.

Postponeuntil is datetime field and indicate when this job will run next time. And it is UTC date meaning if this field contains “2012-10-23 09:08:00.000” and if your time zone is GMT + 1 then this job will run next time on “2012-10-23 10:08:00.000”

RecurrenceStartTime is also UTC datetime field which will be used to set next runtime of job, date part of this field is not important as long as it is set in the past.

Step 2: so using noted down AsyncOperationid in step 1 run following query to update recurrencestarttime, postponeuntil for this Update Contract States job .

So as per above update, this job will run at 9:08 AM (GMT time) in the morning every day.after job run if you verify the details then it would look as follows. So as you can see system will update postponeuntil (next run time) to next day (24th October) after this job run today (on 23th October).

****Important Notes regarding above change****
above change is unsupported so make sure you apply this change to Dev, Test environment before applying this to Live environment. Also make sure you take back up of database before doing this change.

Recently come across scenario where one of CRM user left the company and that user owned specific views which need to be transfer to his replacement CRM users.

These views created by old user using CRM advanced find screen and hence they are personal view of that user and as per CRM security settings even system administrator can not able to view and transfer this views to new user.

So I decided use impersonation to resolve this issue and created small standalone application for the same.

Recently one of our customer asked how to find cases or emails created on Saturday/Sunday or cases created after normal working hours (i.e. after 18 PM?).

Of course this CRM system had email router which were creating those email and automatic case were created based on this.

I did try to so this using advanced find but it is not possible to get the desired result and try to do this using Excel features and it was really easy, following quick steps for the same using Excel.

Step 1: Export data to excel, so do advanced find on CRM (CRM 4.0 or CRM 2011) to retrieve relevant data and then export that to excel.

Step 2: once exported add new columns, let’s say those columns are called “DAY”, “Time HOUR” and “Time MIN”.

Step 3: put formula to retrieve values for those columns, as shown below. Please note that column G is created on date and based on this column G following formula are created. Please change column name as per your requirement.

If you access any CRM views for example account page and if it got more the 5000 records you will see “5000+” as shown below.

You can update this limit by running following query again MSCRM_Config database, so IntColumn contains number of maximum records to be run for CRM. If you put value -1 it will retrieve all the records…

so IntColumn contains number of maximum records to be run for CRM. If you put value -1 it will retrieve all the records

****Important Notes regarding above change****:
1. Above change is unsupported so make sure you apply this change to Dev, Test environment before applying this to Live environment. Also make sure you take back up of database before doing this change
2. This change might impact performance as well since system will retrieve all the records.

There is another registry key called “TurnOffFetchThrottling” is also there which will allow you to retrieve more than 5000 records in CRM, refer following blog article for more information regarding the same.

but above key is only when call is done in the external SDK (fetchXML) calls only, this will not change data retrieve to be display in Entity Grid, so for account grid will still display “5000+” after applied this registry key change and only above SQL script (i.e. unsupported) can change this behaviour.